The Scent of Water (2 page)

But they did not come again, for soon after that Mary’s father died, and her mother, hard at work launching her clever children into the world on the wings of scholarships, lost touch with her husband’s family. She had never liked them anyway. They were a queer lot.

Mary was once more sitting at her desk, very much shaken by the wave of forgotten memories that had broken over her, and slightly scandalized by the way she had abandoned herself to them. She had, literally, forgotten where and who she was. She had been again that little girl of—how many years ago? She must have been about eight years old. Forty-two years ago. All that time gone by, and now those flowers in the silver tankard were more real to her than the pile of official letters waiting on her desk. She straightened her shoulders, took the first one off the pile and then dropped it on the blotter. Was the child she had been five minutes ago an imaginative child? I must be, she thought. I mean, I must have been, or I wouldn’t have felt like that about the trees, or thought as I did about going into a picture, into a hidden country. Father was imaginative, I think, but not Mother. I’ve always thought I was more like Mother.

It had been her father’s brains but her mother’s drive that had taken her to a good school, to Oxford, where she had won a first in modern languages, to the top of the teaching profession before the war and after it into government service. When she retired it would be on a good pension, augmented by an annuity left her by a man who had died in the war, and she would have all she wanted. But she would not want a house in the country. When she had her next leave she would go down to Appleshaw and sell the house and dispose of any furniture she did not want to keep. She would write to a lawyer now and tell him, and then it would be off her mind and she could concentrate on her work. She pulled a piece of notepaper toward her, and then suddenly found herself with her hands covering her face, remembering a frail blue glass tea set and an ivory coach. Were the little things still there after forty-two years? It did not seem likely but if they were she would bring them back to London, to the flat. No. How could she? She had not been able to do it before and she could not now. They belonged there, not here. There and here were two different worlds. Though could you call that a world, that enchanted country in which a child had lived for a few hours forty-two years ago?
This
was the world, her world, the other was merely the shadow of a dying way of life. The shadow was moving over the grass slowly, while the birds sang their cool ringing song in the trees at the bottom of the garden. Presently it would be gone. Then they would cut down the trees and build a nuclear power station there. You sentimental fool, she said to herself, but her hands were still over her face and she was wondering whether the wistaria still hung over the pillared way that led to the front door.

Why did she take such a fancy to me? Why did she leave me her poor little bit of money, her house and all she had? I forgot her but she did not forget me, and she was what the world calls peculiar and I’m supposed to be eminently sensible. Yet her memory was better than mine. I thought she was old, that day, but she wasn’t much over forty. When I go back it will be the other way around, she will be young and I shall be old.

She dropped her hands into her lap, straightened herself and sighed deeply, but more with relief than sadness. Somewhere, at some deep level, she had made a decision. Or it had been made for her. Yet she felt she had something to do with it, for it felt like an act of obedience. She was giving up her work and going to Appleshaw as soon as possible, to live there. It would mean losing her pension but with the small legacy from Cousin Mary, and her annuity, she would manage. She picked up her pen and wrote her letter to the lawyer, but it was not the letter she had meant to write. She asked him to send her the name and address of the village woman who had looked after her old cousin. She would, she said, ask this woman to keep the house in order for her until she came. She would come in the spring, in May, not to view it but to take possession. She stamped the letter, put it in her “out” basket, and turned once more to her work, this time with entire and successful concentration.

B
UT why didn’t I go down at once to see the place? she wondered, as she drove smoothly through the London traffic. She drove well. She was in all things capable, as in all things honest. She did not often ask questions of herself, for she was not introspective and there was not enough time, but when she did the answers were generally truthful. This one astonished her, though she knew it was the truth. She had been afraid. She, a courageous woman, had been afraid, and there had been several strands in the twist of her fear. She had been afraid that the Appleshaw she remembered no longer existed, and that she would not find again the old enchantment. Or that she would find the village unchanged but the house a ruin, and in despair sell it out of hand. Or that if she went there uncommitted she might, when she went home to London again, let herself be overborne by Catherine’s disapproval. Now, with her boats burned behind her, she was committed. But why is it so important that I live there? she asked herself. I’m a Londoner. I don’t know about country things. What will I do all day?

But she couldn’t depress herself, and as she left London behind her, with her friends, her work, her interests and all that she loved, her spirits were actually rising. She had left home much later than she had meant to, and after a scrappy breakfast, and by the time she reached Westwater, a country town by the river which was the nearest shopping place of any size to Appleshaw, it was twelve-thirty and she was hungry. She drove slowly up the beautiful High Street, looking for the best place to eat. She chose an old half-timbered house called the White Swan, with a bay window of diamond-paned glass and the swan painted upon a swinging sign. She went in and sat at a table against a wall. There were as yet only a few people there and they were all by the window, women in from the country, doing their shopping. They seemed to know each other and they talked together, enjoying this weekly break from their home chores. One or two were well-dressed but most of them looked comfortably shabby in their weather-worn tweeds. I’ll soon look like that myself, thought Mary, and feeling a pang of dismay she looked at herself in a long mirror hanging on the opposite wall.

The sight reassured her, for she was a miraculously preserved fifty. She had kept her tall slender figure and straight back and did not sag either at the shoulders or in the middle. The bones of her face were good, broad across the cheekbones and narrowing to a small firm chin. Her dark eyes were bright and lively under eyebrows whose mobility, combined with her resolute mouth and short determined nose, had often struck terror to the hearts of her subordinates. Her hair was thick and iron-gray, and her smooth ivory skin, only faintly lined about the eyes, needed little makeup. She wore no jewel, apart from her gold wristwatch, and her plain black dress and short jacket, with a vivid flame-colored scarf, cast a slight blight upon the women in the window. Their conversation faltered for a moment or two, and then in resolute self-defense they turned their eyes away and picked up the broken threads of their conversation.

Mary chose the best the menu could suggest and ate it with resignation, hoping the coffee would be better. That glimpse of herself in the glass, looking so surprisingly young, had suddenly sent her thoughts back over the past. The struggle of the years after her father had died, very hard work, very little money, but a great deal of fun when the children were together during the London holidays and entertainment was cheap and easily come by. The happiness of school and college days, the thrill of early love affairs, which she had always ended before they became too serious because in these matters she could never feel as she would have liked to feel. Her years of teaching before the war, with the pride of being house mistress in a famous school before she was thirty, and her holidays abroad. She had liked teaching. She knew the trick of discipline and taught well. And she had loved the children steadily and patiently, taking pains to understand them. Then the war, return to London and work at the Admiralty, the blitz and the fear and pity and raging anger of it, and the deaths of two of her brothers.

And then her engagement in her early thirties to a sailor whom she had met at the Admiralty, a man older than herself and so infinitely her superior in intellect and power of love that the glowing, deeply emotional months of their engagement had made her feel a little unreal, for the first time in her life unsure of herself, carried along by a tide too strong for her. He had been killed a week before the date fixed for their wedding and her shock and grief and disappointment had darkened her life for a while. But not enough grief. Paradoxically she had broken her heart because her sorrow had not been the overwhelming anguish she had seen in others. She had realized with shame that the deep affection which was her way of loving had not been enough. Overwhelming love between man and woman, a symbol perhaps of some deeper mystery, she knew nothing whatever about, and she had been haunted by Rupert Brooke’s sonnet,

I said I loved you; it’s not true.

Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.

She was landlocked in herself. For a time she had sorrowed because not only was she bereaved of the man but also by reason of what she was, of her birthright of true grief. Then her resilient nature had come to her rescue and when the war ended she had given herself with energy to the business of clearing up the mess.

She had gone out to Germany with a Red Cross unit and worked with and for the shattered men and women coming out of the concentration camps. Nothing she had seen in the blitz had been more fearful and at length even her good health had broken down. She had come back to England and after a rest, and on the strength of her war service and knowledge of languages, had obtained her government post and risen slowly and steadily to as high as she could well go. She had enjoyed postwar London, in spite of the noise, the rush, the luxury and the undercurrent of perpetual fear, and she had been so busy that she had not thought a great deal about John.

But now she remembered him with extraordinary vividness. Why should he suddenly be so real to her at this moment? Why should the memory of their days together be rushing back on her in this teashop? They’ve come out with the others, the Cousin Mary ones, she thought, because those two loved me and whatever I gave in return was not enough. She paid her bill, accepted a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. Not here, she thought, and not yet. There’s a lot to do. Not yet. She pushed the thought of John away from her and looked out of the window at the beautiful street. It was old and dignified, and had the gentle windings of a stream, but between the tall quiet houses went cars and lorries and restless people in a stench of petrol. It’s a sort of meeting place here, thought Mary, it’s where the waves break. The tide is coming in over the old ways but I shall find quiet inlets still, and pools and rocks that only the spray touches. She went out of the shop and as she stood beside her locked car, feeling for the key in her bag, she thought briefly of London and the work she had done there. It seemed to her far away and not very important. She got into her car and drove off.

She was very soon in the country, and driving slowly lest she lose her way. She had studied her map carefully before starting but the twisting lanes were confusing, and she felt a little stunned by the beauty about her. Her love of going abroad had caused her to know little of the English countryside. She had spent weekends with friends in their country cottages, weekends of good food, good talk and good bridge that might just as well have taken place in London, and other friends had motored her down to lunch in country hotels, to Henley regatta and to Oxford, but again good talk and good food had predominated. She had seldom been alone in the country and she had not realized that anything quite so remote as this existed so near London.

She did not know that she had stopped the car until through the lowered window she heard the ring of birdsong in the tall trees. She was in a silver-stemmed beech wood roofed with green and gold. The floor of the wood was tawny with beech mast beneath the polished darker green of low-growing hollies, the silver, green and tawny faintly veiled by the gauzy blue air of spring. And the birds sang. That piercing clear deep ringing and ringing seemed thrusting through her almost intolerably. She believed she had not heard such birdsong since she was a child; yet every year they had been singing like this in the tall woods of England, those that remained.

Through the echoing timber thrush doth so wrench and ring

The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.

John had loved that poem and she was grateful for it at this moment. The poets did at least put it into words for you and ease the pain of it.

She drove on, for time was passing. She came out presently on high ground and looked down over a great plain and across it to a far line of blue hills. She saw a city, so alchemized by distance and blue air that its towers and spires seemed drifting on the plain like the vision of Lyonesse that is seen floating out at sea. Between her and the city she saw villages and farmsteads and the gleam of silver where river and stream wound through the water meadows. Against the steep slopes below her, apple blossom broke like spray.

The lane took her away from this far view, keeping on high ground but going through woods again and giving her a sense of penetration. She remembered an Indian toy she had had as a child. Many-colored boxes were placed one within another, and at the end came a small golden box that was the heart of the matter. It was so small that it could have been placed with Cousin Mary’s little things. Her heart began to beat fast, for she believed she was coming to that extraordinary avenue of trees; if they were still there after forty-two years. She steeled herself to see a caravan site where once the trees had been, and when she got to the village a row of council houses replacing the thatched cottages around the green.

She was within the avenue almost before she knew it, and the trees were the same. She stopped the car and got out and stood in the deserted lane looking up at them. If they were not quite as tremendous as she remembered, she had expected that, for the scenes of childhood revisited always seemed smaller in reality than memory, but even so they were immense and she felt their power just as she had as a child. And their possessiveness also. Who had planted these giants in their ranks? They turned the country lane into a gracious avenue that looked as though it must lead to a great house. There was a small, lovely manor house away to the left but it did not match the trees.

As she walked back to her car a stout little woman in the uniform of a district nurse came toward her on a bicycle from the direction of the village, pedaling vigorously. As she passed Mary she gave her head a jerk that sent her spectacles down her nose. Over the top of them her bright kind eyes took Mary in from head to foot. With a half-smile, and a nod of brisk approval, she jerked her glasses back into position and pedaled on.

Mary got into her car and drove slowly down the avenue. It ended abruptly, as she remembered, at the bluebell wood, where the lane ran steeply downhill between the wood and some fields where she heard the cuckoo calling. She had forgotten this lane but she remembered the cuckoo. Some bungalows had been built beside the lane but they were not too blatantly modern and pretty gardens had grown up around them. At the garden gate of one of the bungalows an old man stood propped up on two sticks, a battered hat on his head. His shabby clothes hung loosely on his shrunken body but they had once been good clothes and there was about him, in spite of his feebleness, an air of alertness, of discipline, that attracted her. As she came opposite him he transferred, with infinite difficulty, the stick that was in his right hand to his left, lifted his hat and smiled at her with shy courtesy. She returned the smile with a sense of warmth about her heart, for it was almost as though he had been watching for her. But the moment she had passed him she was seized with panic. People! Of course there would be people living here, and the small community of a remote village was welded together like the different parts of a body. The hand could not say to the foot, I have no need of you. But why am I feeling panicky? she asked herself. I have always liked knowing people. Whom now do I want to know? The odd answer came back at once. Cousin Mary and John.

She turned the corner, the bell pealing the hour over her head, and there was the square church tower above the gray rock of nave and chancel, and the slanting gravestones and the thatched cottages about the green. She drove at a snail’s pace. I believe it’s twelfth-century, she thought with awe, looking at the church. Father did not tell me it was so old. The churchyard was no longer filled with grass and buttercups, for it was well kept, and on the other side of it she could see a small Georgian house in a garden full of trees that might be the vicarage. It must always have been there but as a small child she had not noticed it behind the tall grass and buttercups. There was a telephone kiosk in front of the village shop and post office, and two of the cottages looked as though those who lived there now had not been born and bred in Appleshaw. But those were the only changes. After forty-two years this was still Appleshaw.

People? To her relief there were only two to see her arrival. An elderly lady was coming out of the post office as she passed it. She wore dark glasses, a gray tweed skirt longer at the back than the front, a home-knitted cardigan of bright pink and a sad black straw hat. She was tall and tremulous and when she saw Mary she was so startled that she swayed a little, and put her hand to the side of the post office door to support herself. She had the soft crumpled face of a lost and frightened child, and Mary found herself giving her a quick smile of reassurance.

In front of the smarter of the two modernized cottages, with rose-pink walls and a small elegant wrought-iron gate leading into a little garden, a slim dark-haired woman wearing green slacks and a yellow pullover was giving her front door a new coat of turquoise paint. She turned around as Mary’s car came by. She had clear-cut features and faultless makeup but her face was thin and prematurely hardened and when her dark eyes met Mary’s with a cool appraising stare the unhappiness in them was somehow shocking on this day of sunshine and singing birds.